Question 4 - Your Connection Is Down

The customer called letting us know that their connection was down. The customer also tells us that "It Can't Be Our Super High End Double Redundant High Availability Fusion Reactor Back Up Router", so it must be us.

Some Lessons I picked Up

Keep It Simple, and buy a backup

The more complex the device is, the more possible failure becomes. Failure often happens on the human side in more complex situations. It can be an order of magnitude cheaper (and simpler) to simple get two of X rather than one High Availability system. There are situations where High Availability is important. But remember that the expense should include training as many of these HA devices are more complex to administer.

Something to keep in mind. We have been running a number of Ciscos for 7 years and had one failure. We simply swapped a new one in and that was that. He have one large company that connects to us via a HA router that has dropped packets periodically making the connection unusable. The problem has been on again off again for almost 1 year. The HA device simply stops working for some period of time.

Keeping things simple will increase your up time. It will make it easier to find people to administer the equipment.